Design Lead — Set the quality bar for a product used by thousands every day

Location: Malmö (Hybrid)
Salary range: 58,000–66,000 SEK/month

If you’re a design leader who cares deeply about craft, clarity, and building people and systems, this could be your next move.

We’re looking for a Design Lead to own design excellence at Refined — developing designers, setting clear standards, and ensuring our product experience stays coherent, polished, and intentional as we scale.

Key points about the role at a glance

✅ Primary purpose: Ensure consistently high-quality product design by developing designers and owning the standards, systems, and practices that enable great work at scale.

✅ Impact: Directly shapes how thousands of customers experience Refined — while enabling designers, PMs, and engineers to move faster with confidence and clarity.

✅ Growth & development: Manager and function leadership role with clear ownership, influence on product strategy, and the mandate to shape how design works at Refined.

✅ Team & leadership: You’ll manage the Product Design team and partner closely with the Head of Product in a outcome-focused leadership setup.

✅ Salary range: 58,000–66,000 SEK/month, depending on experience.

❌ This might not be for you if:

• You want to be embedded in one team primarily doing design work

• You’re not excited about developing people, setting standards, and owning systems and processes

Why this role matters

As Refined grows, so does product complexity. Without a clear design owner, the risk is inconsistency, growing UX debt, slower decisions, and diluted user experience.

This role exists to set and protect the quality bar, develop designers’ craft and confidence, and ensure our design system and practices scale with the product — not against it.

This could be a great next step if you want to:

• Be accountable for design quality across multiple products, not just one team

• Develop designers into confident decision-makers and strong partners

• Shape how design systems, critique, and standards actually work in practice

• Influence product strategy through user experience and design judgment

• Build clarity and coherence in complex, ambiguous problem spaces

What you’ll do

As our Design Lead, you’ll operate across product initiatives to ensure strong design leadership, quality, and alignment.

• Own design excellence at Refined by setting the quality bar, standards, and decision frameworks for UX, UI, and end-to-end product experiences

• Lead, develop, and line-manage Product Designers — growing craft, judgment, confidence, and accountability

• Own and evolve the design system and design review practices to enable consistency, quality, and speed at scale

• Act as the final design decision-maker when alignment is unclear, trade-offs are complex, or cross-team consistency is at stake

• Partner closely with the Head of Product to shape product vision and strategy from a user experience perspective

• Establish design as a trusted, credible partner to Product and Engineering through clear communication and follow-through

What success looks like — your first year at Refined

• In 3 months:

  • Strong relationships established with designers, PMs, and EMs

  • Clear understanding of current UX gaps, design debt, and system maturity

  • Design review and critique cadence established and actively used

  • Initial quality bar and expectations clearly communicated to designers

• In 6 months:

  • Designers demonstrate improved ownership, confidence, and consistency in design decisions

  • Design system ownership is clearly defined, actively used, and trusted

  • Cross-team UX inconsistencies are actively being addressed

  • Design is seen as a credible, structured partner in product discovery and planning

• In 12 months:

  • Consistently high design quality across product surfaces

  • Design system is a core enabler of speed, quality, and coherence

  • Designers operate as strong, trusted partners in product trios

  • Design contributes meaningfully to product strategy and customer value

  • Clear reduction in UX debt and fewer escalations around design decisions

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for someone who enjoys setting direction, developing people, and making thoughtful trade-offs in complex environments.

Must-haves

• Experience leading and developing product designers through coaching and feedback

• Experience scaling design practices (e.g. design systems) and influencing product direction in complex environments

• Strong design judgment with a clear point of view on quality and design standards

• Systems thinking across UX, UI, and end-to-end product experiences

• Proven track record of shipping complex product work

• Experience working closely with Product and Engineering leadership

Nice-to-haves

• Exposure to enterprise or complex SaaS products

• Experience influencing product vision or strategy at leadership level

Above all, you’re calm, credible, and opinionated in the right way — someone who raises the bar without micromanaging and helps others do the same.

Who you’ll work with

You’ll join our Product organization and work closely with:

• Product Designers (your direct reports)

• Product Managers and Engineering Managers

• Head of Product (your closest leadership partner)

We’re a global team with hubs in Malmö, Helsinki, and colleagues across Europe, the US, and Brazil. We meet in person at least twice a year during company-wide gatherings.

Benefits & salary

We value transparency. Here’s what you can expect when you join Refined – specific details may vary by location, and we’ll go through them with you during the hiring process.

All employees receive benefits based on Scandinavian standards, with small variations per country:

• Core benefits: Pension, health insurance, sick leave, and five weeks of paid vacation.

• Parental leave: Paid parental leave to support new parents.

• Work–life balance: Flexible hours, hybrid work (typically 2–3 office days per week), and the trust to manage your own schedule.

• Development & wellness: Learning budget, wellness allowance, and dedicated time to grow personally and professionally.

• Culture perks: Twice-yearly company offsites, optional team events, and offices where fika and darts are part of the rhythm.

• Global team: This role is based in Malmö. Most colleagues are in these hubs, but we also have teammates in Brazil, New York, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Germany, and Portugal.

• Salary: This role offers a salary range of 58000-66000 SEK depending on experience. We share salary bands transparently in the hiring process to ensure clarity and fairness.

About Refined

We make Atlassian tools simple, branded, and user-friendly – helping more than 5000 companies worldwide, from startups to Apple and Spotify, build sites their teams actually love to use. Read more about our products here>>

Refined is a 70-person SaaS company, founded in Malmö in 2009 and now working across Malmö, Helsinki, and globally. We’re built on Scandinavian roots but our team represents 30+ nationalities.

We value freedom and autonomy, which for us means taking initiative, gathering context, focusing on impact, and driving things forward. It’s about getting it right over being right.

People thrive here when they lean into challenges, learn by doing, and care about the impact of their work – on colleagues, customers, and the wider ecosystem. Every role has a direct line to customer outcomes, and you’ll see your work shaping how thousands of people experience Atlassian every day.

We’re also proud members of Pledge 1%, giving back to people and the planet.

✨ In short: we’re product-led, human-centered, and impact-driven – a startup-minded SaaS company filled with passionate people who care deeply, challenge directly, and continuously improve together.

Learn more about life at working at Refined>>

Recruitment process

We are reviewing applications on a rolling basis.

For any questions, reach out to Chloe for a confidential chat about the role. chloe.nauta@refined.com

After submitting your application, here’s what to expect:

1. Fill out a pre-screening logic and personality test via Alva Labs.

2. The next steps include an introductory call and two interviews focusing on competence and cultural fit.

3. Finally, if we believe it’s a good match both ways, we’ll give you an offer.

We look forward to your application and potentially welcoming you to Refined!

We started Refined in 2009 with a simple idea: Enterprise software doesn’t have to be boring. Since then, Refined has evolved from a handy theming tool into a full-fledged site builder, helping more than 5,000 companies worldwide transform their Atlassian Confluence and Jira instances into beautiful, branded sites users love.